"I" in academic and scholarly writing

[rm]

This is not a search for advice. This is a point of curiosity to me, because my education was sort of extreme and obsessive on this point, and it occurs to me that perhaps other fifth-graders were not scarred for life by writing papers that said things like "this author feels that Disney World would be an idea summer vacation destination for her family."

So, inquiring minds and all that....

[Poll #1563413]

Comments

[ladyaelfwynn.livejournal.com]

I have a Masters degree and this wasn't ever covered, ever. But then I didn't have to write a thesis. Yay! UMD Library School!

[whatifisaidno.livejournal.com]

here via my dreamwidth network

I am still extremely bitter over the prescriptiveness of my pre-university writing classes :D 'I's can be useful things.

[alienor.livejournal.com]

In grade school, I was taught "the author..." construction, but college made it clear that only VERY VERY VERY rarely is it appropriate to reference yourself in formal writing.

I believe my thesis was written in the passive voice "this was done to the materials..." because of this concern.

I do (now) get annoyed with "my opinion is" constructions because, duh, if you're writing it of course it's your opinion (or experiences, or whatever). Of course, I've now taken a wealth of technical editing continuing education courses (I'm an engineer) and find that any phrase that doesn't convey meaning irritates me.

[shadowravyn.livejournal.com]

Wheres in my college and grad school, "I" is considered acceptable, as what you're putting forth are your thoughts and ideas. They're just backed up by people who have said the same thing previously and who have more letters after their name than you.

Of course, my degrees are in English, so YMMV.

[sageautumn.livejournal.com]

If I were reading a paper/book/anything... ...I would much rather deal with "I" than "the author" over and over. That crap is annoying.

[thenowhere.livejournal.com]

This.

[jgcr.livejournal.com]

I don't think this was ever explicitly covered in my undergraduate or post-graduate education. In high school, I think it was, but I honestly don't remember.

Implicitly (post high-school), it seemed like there were two understandings:

In the humanities (my undergrad) you mostly didn't unless it was the kind of paper where you did -- though it's not like anyone drew a diagram as to which was which. There was a lot of critical theory stuff of various flavors running around, and some of them seemed to go well with an "I" approach.

For social science style papers (grad school), it was all stylized "In this paper I [or we] will show [blah] by doing [blah] and [blah]." No emotional connection, but strong emphasis on ownership of the research.

[newsbean.livejournal.com]

Good point. I answered based on my humanities classes rather than science. There is definitely a difference in style, and I would be surprised not to see the "In this paper I will show..." construction in a scientific paper. (This changes somewhat by discipline and journal.)

[dorei.livejournal.com]

The reason I chose "occasionally acceptable" in pre-college education is only because of my time at Westtown. When I was in my public school education, I was taught to never, ever, EVER use "I" in any sort of essay. But, when I went to Westtown, a lovely college-prep type school, we were taught that while in most writings it would be frowned upon to use "I", there are times when it would be detrimental not to do so. So, yay for prep school education.

[graene.livejournal.com]

Pretty much even in upper HS/college, "I" or "this author" if we wanted to be very formal, seemed to be ok in anything that was a strict opinion piece - book review, etc where the assignment was how *you* felt about the piece, believed it would be perceived, a journal, etc. And I mean upper - first grade book reports were what the book was about, third person only.

Anything other than that, I still default to what the evidence shows, third person, etc. due to strict penalties as a child.

[ruisseau.livejournal.com]

It really depends on your discourse community. I wrote a sociology paper in which I expressed my opinion and not once did I use "I." The same goes for the mathematics paper I wrote. However, I use "I" extensively in papers I write for my education classes because reflecting on my growth and on the future usefulness of research I have done is par for the course.

[delchi.livejournal.com]

When I did professional technical writing, I was more focused on getting the tech bits right, and making them understandable. My work was then handed off to a cadre of editors who took care of such things for me. When it was edited, I would go back and make sure they did not twiddle the techie bits and then sign off on it. The idea was that we spent our time being technical & making inside jokes about people with flashing 12's on their VCRs & not obsessing on the current edition of the style manual, whereas our editing team spent their late nights reading up on the latest acceptable use of "I" and making inside jokes about people who misuse commas.

Some would call that poor education, and say that a well refined person would know both how to write technically , and correctly.
This used to disturb me until I discovered that the majority of people I dealt with who considered me unrefined were just mucking about trying to get more people to play their game.

[such_heights]

I use 'I' all the time! It's encouraged in my uni department (philosophy) as the best way of making it clear when we're expressing our own ideas.

[rexluscus.livejournal.com]

First of all, my discipline is English, so that informs the following. In high school I was taught to use "I" sparingly, and got the message that there is a right and a wrong way to do it but I didn't know what those were. In college I avoided it, although I wasn't told to. I think I was trying to imitate a certain kind of authority. Now, I use it fairly often, because I feel like to do otherwise would be dishonest - I don't want to conceal my subject position because it's the basis for everything I'm saying. I'm drawn to criticism that is at least a little bit critical of its own agenda, and I don't trust the kind that screens its own authority. I have the impression you can only get away with this in the humanities, though.

[rm.livejournal.com]

I don't trust the kind that screens its own authority

I was taught, obsessively and in a way that shamed me, never to use "I" before I got to university. Then, in university, I was mocked for all my work sounding like it was written by old white dudes from the 19th century (and of course, I thought the mockers were complete heathens who didn't know anything). Now, I'm in a position where part of my authority comes from the emotional component implied by I, and I find myself having to juggle two layers of shame to make a point that should be quite simple to make, and, in no way involves random bullshit like "it is my opinion" (I mean, obviously, I'm writing the fucking thing).

[rhiannonstone.livejournal.com]

In K-12 it was taught as a not-unbreakable rule--you shouldn't do it most of the time except when you're asked to write about your opinions/beliefs/experiences or if you're smart enough to do it creatively--though it was drilled into us pretty hard to avoid any sort of meta-writing--"I am going to write about," "In an earlier paragraph I said," etc.--and to NEVER EVER use "you" or otherwise address the reader.

It was never mentioned in my community college writing courses or at all at University, not even in the hardcore grammar, syntax, and essay-writing courses I took because I was working as a writing coach for ESL and low-skills students. It was taken as sort of a given that sometimes it's okay and sometimes it's not and at this point most of us understand the difference. When I was helping students with their essays I tried to explain the different situations in which it's okay and not, and they seemed to understand.

[smirnoffmule.livejournal.com]

It was never raised as an issue to me in school; I don't think they had that much farsight with regards our academic futures to be honest (very much an attitude of hey, we're just happy you can read!). At A-level it was discouraged, and I was taught at degree level that it's never acceptable - though such_heights has reminded me I have still done it and not been marked down for it in Philosophy essays if it's the clearest way to express a thought experiment etc. My English tutor was a tyrant about it though, so now I probably wouldn't ever if I could avoid it.

[featherofeeling.livejournal.com]

Many of my university professors spent a long time disabusing us of the notion that using "I" is categorically forbidden, discussing the illusion of the neutral observer created by avoiding it, and mostly agreeing that discussing one's own positionality is necessary to the reader's understanding of the work. Then again, this mostly came up in presentations of sociological or other field research - especially in methods sections. Within the sociology major, I'd have answered "is necessary" to the second question, and in my other humanities subjects, "is often acceptable."

[p-zeitgeist.livejournal.com]

This has always struck me as a question about quality of prose, and about the writer's confidence in her command of formal language.

If there's some rule in American academia saying that you shouldn't use "I" in academic or scholarly writing, I'd suspect it grows out of a formalization of observed practice, and that the observed practice in turn grew out of writers' anxieties about their own writing. If you look at J.R.R. Tolkien's academic work, or the opinions of Mr. Justice Holmes, you'll see that they use "I" where it's warranted -- and you'll also see that neither one has any reason to doubt his ability to write in language that's both formal enough for the highest occasion and flexible enough for everyday use.

This is a case where both the confidence and the substantive reason to be confident are relevant, I think: this kind of formal speech only works (in the sense of conveying authority as well as information/argument) when the reader perceives it as natural and unforced, when it neither talks down to the reader nor has anything of ingratiating faux-populism to it. So it requires that the writer be comfortable with it; discomfort will show. At the same time, though, a writer doing this had better have the skill to handle the language well, and the substantive content needs to match the degree of confidence expressed in it; otherwise the authorial voice will seem not confident but arrogant, and unpleasantly so.

Done well, this kind of formal writing makes all other forms look pathetic and inadequate. But I do understand why not all academic writers attempt it: proscriptions by earlier teachers aside, it's something of a high-wire act. If you try it and fail, well, it's a long, long way to the ground.

[rm.livejournal.com]

As much as this was both not a plea for advice, and you've been relatively insulted from my narratives about the process of writing this paper for the Bristol conference, you can, no doubt, clearly see what I'm running up against, and the way it is complicated less by my lack of academic expertise and more by my possession of other types of relevant authority which are central to the paper, perhaps, in part, because my anxiety about their presence in my work illustrates the point I'm trying to make about fannish proprietariness over characters through mourning ritual being so intensely transgressive both within the community and outside of it.

Okay, that sentence above proves I've been staring at this shit waaaaaaaaaaaay too long.

[sahiya.livejournal.com]

I was taught that it is acceptable as long as it is used consistently throughout the paper and not just once or twice, as that can be jarring to the reader. I have seen some truly remarkable academic works done this way in recent years - Svetlana Boym's The Future of Nostalgia comes to mind.

Personally, I think that there is a trend in the humanities towards scholarly work becoming more readable and accessible, and as that happens, it will become more common. In this vein, I have tried to do it and discovered that it makes me extremely uncomfortable. I'm hoping to work on that during my PhD.

[mellacita.livejournal.com]

I spend hours every week wheedling academics into getting over it. The passive voice is boring to read, muddles the substance, and is not the slightest bit compelling. Own your research, your findings, and your analysis. People will care about them more that way.

At least, that's what this author thinks. *g*

I'm not alone, though, not even among academics. Of course, others will disagree vehemently. Personally, I will hold my nose and use the passive voice if, after reading the journal or conference abstracts, that seems to be non-negotiable. Most of the time.

[azurelunatic]

The passive voice was a major high school innovation -- when one desires to get across the point that, say, mud was thrown, but without implicating the acutual thrower, or indeed, acknowledge that there would indeed have to be a thrower when an object (like mud, or that rock) was thrown.

(An observer of this author's high school career woulld have had plenty of material for a paper on the effects of uncontrolled ADHD in the person of the author's best friend at the time.)

[starstealingirl.livejournal.com]

To be fair, my background's in interdisciplinary humanities scholarship-- particularly feminist scholarship. People like the "I" in feminist scholarship-- the idea is that you should make clear who is conducting the scholarship, from what perspectives, and address your own limited perspective, because it makes room for a more egalitarian, collaborative approach to your scholarship. The use of the first person emphasizes that you're one person, with a specific physical and intellectual location, as opposed to passing off your perspective as that of some sort of disembodied voice of authority.

Then again, I'm sure that people in other disciplines would argue that us interdisciplinary humanities types are just a bunch of damn hippies who can't tell an academic paper apart from a blog entry.

[eumelia.livejournal.com]

This is now making me well up.

I'm writing a paper on Slash fiction, Porn and Torchwood.

I can't avoid being completely and utterly and overtly subjective!

[kaythay.livejournal.com]

I don't think this issue was ever addressed in high school as we mostly wrote stories or opinion letters.
In er... college, lit. essays didn't traumatize me over the issue. I don't think I used the "I", or "this author". I used more something along these lines "This part of the text (insert example here in the appropriate format) seems to indicate that ... ".
I can't say much about university as I studied fundamental sciences and the use of "I" is strictly forbidden with the exception of a few very specific instances.
Er... I should add that most of my schooling is in French so this might not be relevant at all.

[fmanalyst.livejournal.com]

At this point, I can't remember what I was taught, only what I teach.

As other commenters have mentioned, the restriction goes by discipline. The same disciplines that restrict the first person also prefer the passive voice. The agent of an action may be less important than the action that was taken. As I've explained the issue in a handout for faculty:

Students who have been warned against the passive verb and encouraged to use first person in their English courses may founder in writing for their other courses because academic discourse in many of the sciences relies on these constructions to avoid overusing such constructions as “I applied this variable to the experiment”. So why do English professors discourage the passive, but other professors encourage it? The passive voice de-emphasizes the performer of the action. In narratives that students may write for their English classes, the performer of an action is perhaps the most significant element in the students’ texts. But for students writing a lab report, the performer of the action of the experiment is perhaps the least significant element, since the experiment is expected to proceed regardless of who performs it. The focus there is on the action and its object, not the researcher who performs it.

[copperbadge.livejournal.com]

I was taught that "I" was unacceptable, in high school, but in college it was in all the academic papers anyway so I said fuckit and started using it for mainly stylistic reasons. I've come to the conclusion that it's fine as long as it's not followed by a personal statement of belief; opinions should either be eliminated or stated as fact and supported. So "I discovered that XYZ (quote)" is fine; "I believe that XYZ" is not. That's what I picked up from my reading and from three years of grading papers, anyway.

[pantryslut.livejournal.com]

I cannot remember what I was taught pre-college.

In college, I was taught that it depends on the discipline and such. And then I took a Feminist Theory class...

[anahcrow.livejournal.com]

I remember a conversation about the feminist intrusion into the academic space and the growing validity of personal opinion and anecdote as included in academic research: the benefits of, the flaws in, and the resistance to.

Sadly, due to my scrambled memory chemicals, the exact substance has faded.

I do remember that my professors and teachers across the board were cautiously in favour of it when deliberately selected as part of the approach to the material at hand and also had some hopes that it might assist in making accessible to non-academics academically-sourced material that would be important to add to the knowledge base of the general population.

In short, during the madcap days of plenty, I encountered a relatively substantial number of academics who were tired of academic material being produced solely for consumption by the echo chamber and saw things like first-person references in academic text as part of a trend toward making academic text accessible outside the tower.

[lilacsigil.livejournal.com]

Yes, this was precisely my experience.

[dkompare.livejournal.com]

Short cuz I'm finishing up semester grades.

The use of "I" was never a major concern in my writing training at any level. In grad school, we were trained (implicitly, and occasionally explicitly) to learn from the style used by the books and articles we read. As a result, my use of "I" is pretty consonant with others' in media and cultural studies: relatively sparing, and generally used to make a meta-point or give directions (e.g., a line from the intro to my first book, Rerun Nation (http://books.google.com/books?id=wBeeHtDc9KYC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_slider_thumb#v=onepage&q&f=false) (shameless plug alert): "I believe that the industry is neither merely a source nor merely a blueprint, but is rather a complex site of production, in the broadest sense of the word." (xii))